In my last match I've been playing against a better ranked player, and I was leading in the 3rd set (3-1) when he started to hit moonballs on "any" ball. I thought "that's great, he's desperate!". But he won the match.

Which tactic would you adopt in a similar situation?

Please note I'm a decent server and have decent volleys, but starting to serve and volley on the clay after 2 hrs of playing is not an option for me. Also consider my opponent wasn't a pusher or a baseliner, just a good all court player who changed his tactic!

Smashlob

09-20-2004, 05:58 PM

With a moonball you have several options, you should pick the one that best works with your game.

Option 1, Get back far enough so that you can hit the moonball in your strike zone and try to put it to the side of the court.

Option 2: Take the ball on the rise and place it two a corner and try to get in behind it.

Option 3: Moonball back and then rush the net, you can also try faking this move to look for a weaker shot.

aahala

09-20-2004, 06:25 PM

I played an indoor match a number of years ago where my opponent was probably better than I, and he moonballed from the very first point.

For a while I tried to hit to various spots on the court, and wasn't that competitive pointwise, as I made more mistakes than he. Funny thing was, no matter where I hit the ball, he retreived it back to about the same spot on my side. So I started trying to just moonball back to the center of the court and my inconsistency in placement meant I was spraying the ball around!

The set I lost took nearly an hour, and I didn't even win a game.

At some point, I looked around the building and no one else had started a new match. I could tell, everybody in the building was getting a good laugh at how long, and silly those points were taking. Even I started laughing during some of the points--I had begun counting silently how many balls I had hit. Usually in the range of 20-40.

So the viewers got to see a match consisting primarily of points of 40-80 moonballs.:D